Comparing eSATA vs. USB 3.0

The USB 3.0 interface is standard on most new PCs and Macs, so why would you use eSATA instead? We compare eSATA vs. USB 3.0.

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If you've been paying attention to the ports on new PC and Mac desktops and laptops, you'll see that just about all of them come with "new, faster" USB 3.0 ports. These ports are usually (but not always) colored blue to differentiate them from older, slower USB 2.0 ports. Then there's the professional-class eSATA port found on performance PCs, which is physically incompatible with USB, but is still found on desktop replacement laptops and on tower desktops. At home and in the office, which would I use and why?

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface is ubiquitous. It began to come standard on Toshiba laptops and Apple desktops in the late 1990s; now just about every system comes with at least one USB port so it can connect to peripherals like printers, mice, keyboards, external hard drives, scanners, and the like. USB 1.1 started the ball rolling, but is really only useful for communicating with printers, mice, and keyboards. Once USB 2.0 took off in the 2000s, you could start connecting peripherals that stored data like digital media players, USB flash keys, and external hard drives. USB 2.0 tops out at 480Mbps, glacial compared to the 5 Gbps of USB 3.0. You'll never get exactly that 5Gbps throughput, since a) it's shared among the multiple ports connected to the same USB host controller, and b) many devices themselves aren't capable of reaching that level of throughput (spinning hard drives are a prime example). That said, USB's commonaility make it the go-to interface over more esoteric interfaces like eSATA, Fibre Channel, and Thunderbolt.

eSATA has always been considered a professional interface when compared with USB. Seen in systems like professional workstations and graphics artists' high-end PCs, eSATA has the benefit of being designed to work with hard drives primarily, while USB needs to be compatible with many other functions (mouse, keyboard, audio interface, charging, etc.). You'll find it was the "fastest" throughput interface (1.5 Gbps to 6 Gbps) on most PCs before the advent of USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt (10 Gbps). Each eSATA device connects on a one-to-one basis with the PC, so you're not sharing the signal via an internal or external hub. That way the PC's motherboard chipset only has to deal with one drive at a time, and not with multiple devices simultaneously, as with USB. Before USB 3.0, powered eSATA (aka, eSATA+USB 2.0) was the way to get a fast portable drive working with a laptop without having to use a power adapter for the drive.

eSATA still has its place: IT managers can control the use of external hard drives and USB sticks by disabling USB ports on client PCs, while still supporting external drives for the people that need them by using eSATA. eSATA interfaces are also much more common on cable and fiber TV DVRs at home, so you can expand your storage easily with an eSATA drive.

So which do you use? If you're concerned about conveying your data from PC to PC, then USB 3.0 is the undoubted winner. Even if the PC or Mac you're connecting to has older USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 ports, the peripheral will at least connect and transfer data, albeit at a slower rate. If you are concerned about storage alone, particularly for work projects connecting to a single PC, then eSATA is a totally valid choice. You may even find it faster than USB if you have a lot of other USB devices connected to the PC at the same time.

Joel Santo Domingo is the Lead Analyst for the Desktops team at PC Magazine Labs. He joined PC Magazine in 2000, after 7 years of IT work for companies large and small. His background includes managing mobile, desktop and network infrastructure on both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Joel is proof that you can escape the retail grind: he wore a yellow polo shirt early in his tech career. Along the way Joel earned a BA in English Literature and an MBA in Information Technology...
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